Nobody will admit the best novel of our generation is about football(residentcontrarian.com) |
Nobody will admit the best novel of our generation is about football(residentcontrarian.com) |
Hilarious. Probably took the author ages to arrive at this particular formula.
He started out as a darling of the religious right, because he played a major role in causes the religious right considered "theirs." When he began to write with equal clarity about how other aspects of the religious right's focus are at odds with those same deeply held principles that led him to do the work the right loved, they turned on him like this.
Complex moral issues are exactly that, complex. We need more intelligent people thinking hard about them, not more polarization into "you're either with us or against us" mindsets.
I'll be clear here that I'm not interested in judgements on literature provided by someone who frames their worldview as hating one of the few writers willing to address the real complexities of real issues today.
The reasons for that are not examined, and in the context of the reviewer’s opening, it serves as nothing more than a way to say “usually, trust can be built over time, David French’s situation notwithstanding”.
To conclude that the author hates French is a pretty enormous leap.
It strikes me that this comment is guilty of the same thing it complains about.
So I don't know about "hates", but he really does dislike the man.
At the very least, reflect on the immense irony of someone "losing all credibility in your mind" because you perceive them to have a "you're either with us or against us" mentality.
[1] who refers to themselves as "Resident Contrarian", to give you an idea of their intended persona
"OK, so, there’s this thing where if you write a bunch you hope you eventually build up some trust with your audience. You try to be generally reliable and trustworthy in hopes that they come to believe you are generally reasonable, that you wouldn’t try to trick them, and that you aren’t David French. If any of these three things aren’t true, they rightfully come to distrust you."
There is some context I'm missing here, why do you think the author felt tricked by David French?
He maintained his moral and intellectual integrity whereas many of his longtime readers and fans betrayed theirs. So it didn't matter that he had built-up trust. He didn't genuflect to Orange Man and go along sheepishly for the ride the Republican Party has decided to take, so they ditched him.
Just stop. We all have different preferences.
Personally I hate American football (it's too much like a stupid video game now), so you'll never even get me to read whatever book this person is talking about.
Is it the truth, or PR? I agree it's annoying that this narrative is so common, but if I spent all my time getting angry about that kind of PR I wouldn't have time to do anything else. I think we just have to bear it and trust people to dig to find out the truth.
Alternatively, we can also just not care too deeply about the answer and blithely ask on HN-- can someone in the know tell me if David French complains about a specific denomination of Christians, or Christians as a whole? If it is a specific denomination, where do I go to find out a) what a critical mass of that specific denomination thinks about the world, and b) what a critical mass of that specific denomination does about the members of their church that seem to be trolling the rest of us?
And has written a lot about cases of sexual abuse by Christian pastors and leaders.
I greatly admire French and agree that his views have stayed consistent, while the beliefs and actions of most of those who shared the label "Conservative Christian" have greatly changed, or at least been exposed.
> Something like that. Mostly I don't hate him, he just bothers me. I really wish he wasn't the banner-carrier for mainstream Christianity/Conservatism, but I don't wish he'd fall off a cliff or whatever.
I'm not sure if the reviewer's issue with French is rooted in French's willingness to explore nuance in a way that makes christians/conservatives uncomfortable, or if it's because French embraces positions that are really not compatible with the 2022 version of conservatism while still aligning himself with that movement.
In either case, it seems like a position that isn't particularly relevant to the primary content of the review. I will say it was probably an unnecessary distraction to mention him at all, but I don't think that distraction warrants ignoring everything else the reviewer writes.
How do you actually read it?
Edit: hmm, if I very quickly scroll to the bottom of the page, I can click the image to go to the next page before Firefox gets too unhappy.
After 8 paragraphs of this sort of thing we get to the book
The Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles follows the adventures of a fictionalized version of Tim Tebow who, brokenhearted over his inability to make it as an NFL quarterback, arrives in Toronto to join the Argonauts
What school of writing is teaching writers to bury the lede in a page or two of personal anecdotes?
Best out of how many novels that you've read over what period of time? And based on what criteria?
Isn't the proper headline here something more like, "I enjoyed this book"?
What is your interpretation of the title?
In this case, that still makes it indistinguishable from clickbait.
I will never understand the penchant for so many HN users to be such incredible, over-the-top pedantic sticks-in-the-mud when it comes to titles.
> And if you want to engage in some open-field swordplay and smack some defenders to the ground, you might just load the whole damn front -- b1 through b11. Catching one of those is like being hit with a big sack of nickels.
Also, the novel is actually a novella.
Also, it seems not to be a book, but a web page:
https://www.sbnation.com/2014/8/18/5998715/the-tim-tebow-cfl...
[EDIT] Also, from the story:
> Raghib Ismail. Call me Raghib.
sensible-chuckle.gif
[ANOTHER EDIT]
Further into the story now—in case it helps anyone decide whether or not to read it, this isn't slightly-twisted reality or magical realism or light urban fantasy or any of that, really, but full-on dream-logic.
The ‘Honorverse’ books by David Weber has some good battles as well.
He, and all of Secret Base, have deepened my love of sports in just strange and amazing ways. I also never thought that I would honestly look forward to hour long episodes of 80's power-point-like graphics with bad jazz on the statistical careers of old ballplayers.
The Monte-Carlo simulations he does are just somehow perfect for me. And I have no idea why.
The episode on Barry Bonds playing his whole career with a holographic bat is a tour-de-force on how to approach statistics and simulations in a way middle-schoolers can get on broad with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwMfT2cZGHg
It's like public access television locked a savant into an library coding camp basement with outdated software and gave him carte blanche to broadcast his cavernous mind to retirement homes at 2pm on a Sunday.
It's so strange, deep, and wonderful.
"Astronauts don't bring their wallets"
I love everything he has ever done. The Breaking Madden series was genuinely inspiring to me and has caused me to pick up football video games and learn more about the game. I nearly stayed up all night watching all 7 hours of their masterpiece on the Atlanta Falcons
> For a longer time before the gritty period, we all dedicated ourselves to the idea that anything we’d acknowledge as very good had to be both serious and artsy. People really liked Good Will Hunting (see: very serious); it was also a good movie, so it won an Oscar. Zillions of people love movies like The Princess Bride and Happy Gilmore; it’s incredibly likely both dwarf Good Will Hunting in terms of total views, but you can’t even imagine a world where either could have possibly won an Oscar.
[...]
> This is a short article by my standards, but it does have me thinking: What kind of world could we actually live in, if we were willing to treat works of art made with the goal of making us happy as if they were important? What if we were willing to make them? We’ve seen what happens in a world where all the Oscars go to movies that make you cry, or that we pretend make us think even though they generally don't
There are plenty of widely acclaimed movies that can not be considered "very serious", picking some recent Oscar winners as examples with categorizations from wikipedia:
* Parasite ("black comedy thriller")
* Green Book ("comedy-drama")
* The Shape of Water ("romantic fantasy")
* Birdman ("black comedy drama")
* CODA ("comedy-drama")
* La La Land ("comedy-drama")
* Life Of Pie ("adventure-drama")
Are all those completely feel-good movies intended to make you happy? Maybe not, but still its not like happy/humorous/feel-good is completely disregarded category even among grumpy art critics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIgK56cAjfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx_ORMhpmoU&list=PLUXSZMIiUf...
Also watch it all with the realization that the only visualization tool Jon uses for making these is Google Earth.
(Maybe my favorite Jon Bois real-life video, and a smaller bite than those big docs while still getting to all of the above, is "Randall Cunningham Seizes the Means of Production": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZymSrDfLhW8 )
> Tim Tebow finds himself able to do the impossible; he gets the ball and runs it to the end zone. It is then that the entire back of the stadium opens up, and it’s revealed that successful Canadian football drives don’t have a defined stopping point. They go “to street”, meaning that the team can move the ball through the city and out to the wilderness. The entire country of Canada is potentially in play, and Tim Tebow is the only person ever born who is able to take advantage of this.
I loved 17776 and never heard of this but I'm keen to check it out
I have trouble reading longform web stuff (like Worm or Homestuck). I did get through HPMOR and All Night Laundry though!
The author may enjoy books within the New Sincerity realm [1]. They often have magical realist elements [2]. In particular, _Infinite Jest_ seems like a clear recommendation; or for less surrealism, Franzen's _The Corrections_.
I wholeheartedly agree that art allows us to empathize with the lived experience of those who are ostensibly different.
Although some Canadian facts are so weird that they are nearly impossible to believe until you research them. Like the extremely well-appointed throne room at the top of the CN Tower that is kept in reserve for the British monarchy in case the UK is occupied during a war, and the royal family needs a secure and luxurious backup.
My personal favorite aspect is that the best view from the observation deck is looking straight down through the glass floor, and the look of sheer terror from people afraid to walk on it (while the kids jump up and down on the glass).
The longest this took before the lecture started was 29 minutes, although most of the time it's about 5.
You know, Netflix figured out that everyone skips the intros to live comedy shows. People who put on lectures should think about this.
I think it started with the recipe writers and caught on from there.
Thanks, Capitalism!
Grandma would cook Apple pies and the scent would reach me in the field when I was hungry from hard work. I'd come running and she would exclaim "I know how much you love my pies by how you come running!" So there's truth in pies as well as rain.
As I thought about my reply to your comment, I thought back to the time someone sold me oregano in college claiming it was marijuana. I was mad, but that person taught me a valuable lesson about honesty and I vowed I would always try to be an honest person.
After much reflection and with a little help from memories of my ex-wife pointing out all they ways I wasn't honest, all minor complaints mind you, I realized that my response to your criticism of capitalism upset me so that I was probably going to make an emotional response.
I learned not to make emotional responses at a retreat in Central America where we took some kind of psychedelic and did cognitive behavioral therapy from a man I'll call Gunter (not his real name) who was an Austrian fellow who came to this country to organize a coup and stayed after it's success as one of the spiritual leaders of the new communist state. After repeated attempts by him to get me in bed with him, I concluded the communism wasn't good for people and had turned this nice man into a hedonist.
So getting back to my comment, capitalism is the least worse system so we'd probably better stick with it and try and curb the worst excesses of narcissism and self-aggrandizement that it engenders with it's stress on the individual self and ego. This author is correct to attempt to make money under a capitalist system, but is using unintelligent means to accomplish it. I understand not everyone is a great writer and has to resort to tricks, but that's why it pays to hire a editor, whose services the capitalist system incentivizes!
It’s interesting to me that I staunchly agree with your correction, and your interpretation of the original title. I unthinkingly parsed the original title to mean exactly this (to mean the corrected version) and didn’t ever consider its “incorrect” literal meaning.
It makes me wonder if the original title uses a widespread sub-dialect of English grammar which I’ve subconsciously picked up.
Or if it’s just always been common to rearrange words inconsistently/arbitrarily and we learn to rearrange them as correctly as we can manage.
It seems absurd that someone would say "this is the best novel of our generation", and then, despite the fact that it is obviously about football, deny that it's about football. So it seemed unlikely that the title should be interpreted literally like that.
Actually, I should really have clued in that he was the author much, MUCH sooner. That's on me.
https://www.sbnation.com/2014/1/30/5351052/breaking-madden-s...
Edit: watching highlight videos from like 25 years ago.. I had forgotten that he also knelt to pray when he scored, similar to Tebow.
I ran the Google Cinema Club for 10 years. In all that time, no one ever asked for those movies, and we never even seriously considered them.
On the other hand, "The Princess Bride" was constantly being requested, as was "Office Space." There was some reason we couldn't show them; can't remember now what it was.
Is this some kind of joke or is he a buffoon? Princess Bride was nominated for an Oscar and won two Saturn awards and one Hugo.
> if we were willing to treat works of art
The Oscars aren’t awarded by us, they come from industry people. If HN readers voted on software awards, it’s pretty likely that the winners wouldn’t reflect choices made by the wider world. Emacs beating Tik Tok might be our version of Good Will Hunting beating Happy Gilmore.
* "How you like them apples."
* Sean talking about his wife farting when she was nervous.
* Will's entire monologue at the NSA interview.
* "My boy is wicked smaht."
E.g. in Reaper Men, I really liked the story of Death & Miss Flitworth. But the fresh starters in the mall were garbage.
Going Postal is surely among his best, but IMHO the small part with the wizards should have been left out.
The fifth elephant was a story that grew on me. I started out finding it Meh, but after a reread I found it rather good.
The witches were also something that got better as it evolved. Equal rites wasn't that good, but Maskerade was a lot better!!!!! I'd say 'The sea and the little fish' would be my prefered witch story, but it isn't even a book.
For the best, I'd go with Night Watch.
Similarly with this headline.
Ethos, pathos, logos.
What you were enduring was the ethos part, where other people tout the credentials of the speaker so that you will be more likely to accept the The following propaganda.